My houseguest Carla’s new play, Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World premiered last night. The piece is a collaboration with visual artist Amy Trachtenberg, director Jim Cave, and composer Erling Wold. It’s thoroughly entertaining, and completely devoid of anything concerned with narrative, a collage of social and cultural relationships and interactions, combining poetry, theater, song, language and a really cute bald guy with an adorable accent and hairy forearms. Afterward, I congratulated Jocelyn on her very moving delivery of a Spanish monologue, to which she relied, “Thank you,” and then, looking around, asked me “So could you tell me what the play was about?” She’s a talented writer herself, and the publisher of an interesting line of experimental prose and poetry books, Krupskaya Press. (I did one of their covers, Laura Moriarty’s Nude Memoir.) She’ll be accompanying a silent porn film with a benshi narration in October at ATA. Benshi provided live narration to films during the silent era in Japan, but extended the narration into an art form, delivering dialogue and thoughts as well. I’m creating a soundtrack of breaths to accompany her narration.
So D isn’t Bi-polar or even Borderline, after all, just depressed. And he has something like a “dependency syndrome,” I can’t remember exactly what the dysfunction is called, but good grief, are all insecurities diseases now? My favorite non-related diagnoses are Frank Bigelow’s “toxic luminous poisoning” and Scottie Ferguson’s “acute melancholia together with a guilt complex,” which I’m sure I’ll die of. Anyway, I’ve asked to be present when decisions are made for D about his care following his release from lockup. Tuesday was freaky, man. He was very disoriented from the shock therapy, talking gibberish and unable to tell his doctor the story of Goldilocks and the three Bears. (I’m so glad the doctor didn’t ask me for my version.) They say this was “normal,” but will be plugging him in only once a week now, rather than three times. It scared me to see him so vegetable-like, but he seemed much better yesterday, certainly more lucid. I’m going to pop in on him and my crazy new friends again this afternoon.